A young man in his mid-twenties knocks on the door of a renowned Guru.
He says: “have come to you because I wish to study Vedas”.

“Do you know Sanskrit?” -the Guru asks.

“No” , replies the young man.

“Have you studied any Indian philosophy?”

“No”. But don’t worry. I just finished my doctoral dissertation at Harvard on Socratic logic. So now, I would just like to round out my education with a little study of the Vedas.”

“I doubt”, the Guru says, “that you are ready to study Vedas. It is the deepest knowledge ever known. If you wish, however, I am willing to examine you in logic, and if you pass that test I will teach you Vedas”.

The young man agrees.

Guru holds up two fingers. “Two men come down a chimney. One comes out with a clean face; the other comes out with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”

The young man stares at the Guru. “Is that really a test in logic?”

The Guru nods.

“The one with the dirty face washes his face” – he answers confidently.

“Wrong”. The one with the clean face washes his face. Examine the logic. The one with the dirty face looks at the one with the clean face and thinks his face is clean. The one with the clean face looks at the one with the dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. So, the one with the clean face washes his face”.

“Very clever”, the young man says. “Give me another test”.

The Guru again holds up two fingers. “Two men come down a chimney. One comes out with a clean face, the other comes out with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”

“We have already established that. The one with the clean face washes his face”.

“Wrong”. Each one washes his face. Examine the logic. The one with the dirty face looks at the one with the clean face and thinks his face is clean. The one with the clean face looks at the one with the dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. So, the one with the clean face washes his face. When the one with the dirty face sees the one with the clean face wash his face, he also washes his face. So, each one washes his face”.

“I didn’t think of that”,says the young man. “It is shocking to me that I could make an error in logic. Test me again”.

The Guru holds up two fingers.”Two men come down a chimney. One comes out with a clean face; the other comes out with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”

“Each one washes his face”.

“Wrong”. Neither one washes his face. Examine the logic. The one with the dirty face looks at the one with the clean face and thinks his face is clean. The one with the clean face looks at the one with the dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. But when the one with the clean face sees the one with the dirty face doesn’t wash his face, he also doesn’t wash his face. So, neither one washes his face”.

The young man is desperate.”I am qualified to study Vedas. Please give me one more test”.

He groans, though, when the Guru lifts two fingers.”Two men come down a chimney. One comes out with a clean face; the other comes out with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”

“Neither one washes his face”.

“Wrong”. Do you now see why logic is an insufficient basis for studying Vedas? Tell me, how is it possible for two men to come down the same chimney, and for one to come out with a clean face and the other with a dirty face? Don’t you see? The whole question is nonsense, foolishness, and if you spend your whole life trying to answer foolish questions, all your answers will be foolish, too”.

One night Sri Adi Shankaracharya,
the great Advaita master, was desperately searching for something on the street outside his small hut. When his pupil returned from his errand, he saw this and curiously asked the Master, –
“Aacharya, what are you looking for here on the street at this hour ? “

Shankaracharya replied, –
” I lost my needle; I am looking for it.”

The pupil joined him in the search, but after searching for a while, he asked,- “Can you try and recollect where you might have dropped it ? “

Shankaracharya said, –
“Of course, I remember. I dropped it near the bed in the hut.”

The pupil, utterly astonished at the strange answer, said, –
“Aacharya, you say you lost it inside the house, then why are we looking for it outside ? “

Shankaracharya innocently replied,- “There is no oil left in the lamp, so it is pitch dark inside the house. Hence I thought of searching for it outside, since there is enough street light here. “

While holding back his laugh, the pupil said, –
“If you lost your needle inside the house, how could you even expect to find it outside ? “

Shankaracharya simply smiled back at the pupil and the pupil got the message behind the Acharya’s puzzling act. !

Isn’t that what we do ? We run to far away temples and walk up mountains to search for what we have lost inside ourselves. We are all seeking outside what we have lost inside us. Why ? Just because it is pitch dark Inside. !
Silly, aren’t we ?

Light the lamp inside you and find your lost treasure right therein...

He was born into one of America’s richest families, the great grandson of Sir Henry Ford – the tycoon who gave the world the Motorcar and the assembly line.

” I had a normal upbringing.” Alfred B Ford says. ” My parents lived simply.” . But behind that statement lies generations of staggering wealth and privilege : mothers who collected Renoirs and Van Goghs, jet-setting aunts who married Greek shipping tycoons. Sunday school and baseball games. and the great tumult of the ’60s.

By the time he got to college, he was somewhat of an anti-establishment of a person. ” The Vietnam War had started, it was the era of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, we had a Presidential assassination, and we had his brother and Martin Luther King assassinated. ” Says Ford, ” We began to experiment and look at different ways of living. I wanted to know what God looked like. I was looking for a personal connection with God, a relationship with Him.”

Though it seemed to be a ’60s kind of thing to do, in families such as his, it was nothing new to search for higher meaning. ” My grand father Henry Ford,” he says, ” had always wondered how he had acquired the ability to know so much about mechanics. He had very little formal training, and yet, at the age of nine he could take a watch apart and put it back together. One explanation was that he had acquired this in some other lifetime. Though not very religious, he was very interested in spirituality. He believed in reincarnation. A Sufi Mystic came to visit him from India, and he was pretty much of a vegetarian.”

Blame it on the Beatles – George Harrison actually. ” Everything Indian was very popular back in those days,” he recalls, ” I remember, in my college I had a big picture mandala and we used to try and meditate in front of it. I had my hair long and a beard, and then George Harrison, who had become involved in the Krishna Consciousness, produced an album for the Radhe Krishna temple which I bought when I was in college.”

It was a life-defining moment. As soon as the first bhajan began, he says, he found himself crying. ” It touched something very very deep in my heart. It was a very profound experience. I realized that this was the concept of God I was looking for : Govinda, the most attractive…..the protector of cows….the most beautiful….always youthful….eyes like blooming lotus flowers…”

After college, Ford wanted to become a recluse, so he moved to the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, where he lived in a little cabin, and skied every day. But Krishna came looking for him in the form of a close friend who had been a hippy along with him in college, and who had become an initiated disciple in the Krishna Consciousness movement. “He came over with some books, and preached to me.” he says. “He had brought me Prabhupad’s translation of the Bhagvad Gita , and soon, I started to change my lifestyle. I had turned vegetarian in college and I had stopped drinking, and then I started cooking vegetarian food and offering it to Krishna as prasadam. I started chanting on my japa mala and studying Prabhupad’s books.”

Soon a guru-disciple relationship began to develop between the 20-something heir to one of America’s biggest fortunes, and the 80-something pontiff of one of Hinduism’s largest movements. To please his guru, he bought a $6,00,000 mansion in Honolulu to house a temple and learning center. Finally, they met. “I was very nervous as I knew this was a great personality. So, I bowed to him and as I was coming up, he said to me,‘So you are Henry Ford’s great grandson. Where is he now ? ‘

“And that question immediately made me realize that life is so temporary. Krishna Consciousness teaches you that the only eternal relationship and identity you have is with Krishna. I learnt when I was growing up that though I belonged to a family which had everything, still, there was unhappiness and frustration,” says the man who has come as close as any to having it all materially.

But soon there was trouble in paradise. “People definitely thought I had joined a cult,” he says, “but it did not bother me, in the least. I was happy.” And soon his family came round. “I helped set up a center in Detroit in 1983. And for the opening, my parents came, they saw Radha Krishna, the deities there, they took prasadam.”

Perhaps their feelings were assuaged because they realized that he was not about to abdicate his responsibilities. He still attended to the family business and had made quite a reputation for himself as one of the foremost dealers of Indian art. “I used to come to India and buy art from the Maharajahs,” he says, “In those days, we were allowed to take antiques out of the country.” With so much India on his mind and on his sleeve, you did’t need an astrologer to predict the next step : he married an Indian Girl. A Sharmilla Bhattacharya, PhD, from Bengal via Jaipur and Australia. “In the early ’80s, I became friends with one of the Hare Krishna leaders in Australia. There was this beautiful, brilliant Bengali girl, a devotee who was being married off to a doctor against her wishes, and her spiritual guru was worrying about her. Why don’t I marry her, I found myself saying.”

You can bet Krishna smiled. They were married in less than a year, and by the time she got her degree, they were already the proud parents of an American-Bengali-Brahmin-Wasp girl by the name of Amrita !

Life, more or less, settled into a routine now. There was the chanting, the worship at the temple that began at 4 am and lasted till about 9 am, and then there was office to attend to, where he worked as a trustee of the Ford Motor Company Fund, in charge of the company’s charitable work, oversaw an IT company that he had invested into in California, and other investments to attend to. “All this was pure business,” he says. “Krishna’s message to Arjuna was not to give up his position as a warrior and go meditate in the woods, but to fulfill his purpose here in the material world. Go ahead and achieve what you have to, be the best of what you can be, but at the same time, don’t neglect your spiritual life, “ he says simply.

He’s ruffled a few feathers with his passion for setting up Krishna Consciousness centers all over the world. In Russia, the Orthodox Church saw red when he wanted to build a domed building large enough to hold 8000 Hindus, a few miles from the Red Square.

Now, he is going to play footsie with the Indian government over a $250 million ski resort he wants to start in Himachal Pradesh. But for him, it’s all par for the course. Business and spirituality are not strange bedfellows.

“My cousin Bill is more or less vegetarian, eats no red meat, just a little bit of fish, is a Buddhist, studies Eastern religions and is Chairman of the Ford Motor Company, he says. “I send him books on Krishna Consciousness.”

“I am the Self seated in the hearts of all beings”
-Gita,Chapter 10, verse 20:
________________________________________________________________ In a universe of oneness, death is impossible Bell’s Theorem suggests that conscious human activity influences the behavior of subatomic particles in actual laboratory experiments.
The implication that human consciousness is a factor in determining the features of the ‘real’ world is affirmed by the quantum physicist H.S.Stapp. Stapp contends that Bell’s Theorem is the most important result in the history of science, and that it demonstrates the effect of human consciousness at the level of Macrocosm. The impact of our consciousness lies both in the direction of the very small and the very large (microcosm and macrocosm).

The principle of oneness is revealed through Bell’s Theorem and through the connectivity in the ‘Biodance’. In essence it says that through the unbelievable richness of contact that every human has with the universe at large and with every other human being, our concept of death is wrong. In a universe of oneness, death is impossible. The richness of connectivity renders personal extinction impossible, because personal extinction is possible only in a universe of personal isolation. We do not live in such a universe.

The failure to feel the universal oneness that envelopes us all perpetuates the greatest illusion of modern man: the inevitability of personal extinction. This illusion can be countered by an appreciation of the quality of oneness in the universe so well described by modern science.

The usual tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned, for there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of oneness in the universe. If we participate in this universal quality before our death, our survival after death is demanded. The oneness principle endures and we endure with it.

The theorems of Godel and John.S.Bell do much to affirm the experiences of the great Rishis of the Upanishads.

Our greatest spiritual achievement may lie in total integration of the spiritual and the physical – in realizing that the spiritual and the physical are not two aspects of ourselves but one. Perhaps the ultimate spiritual goal is to transcend nothing, but to realize the oneness of our own being, which is implied by Godel and Bell.

The view of ourselves as independent objects that are isolated from the universe we inhabit is erroneous. We cannot distance ourselves from the universe because of our oneness with it.

Relate: A while back I was eating at in a restaurant when from the booth behind me I overheard snippets of a conversation that caught my interest. Two guys who worked at the same place were sitting there talking about a third co-worker. That third guy was apparently a Christian. One of the two men said, “He’s practically a saint.” The other one replied, “I don’t want a saint. I want a good employee.” The conversation moved on but my mind rolled around that last statement. Since when did a good Christian not automatically equate with a good employee? Unfortunately, I’ve met a few examples that fit the bill. Even worse, I’ve been that example a few times in my past. I have heard the saying before, “He is so heavenly minded that…